Fri, 17 Oct 2008

Where we are now - an update

After publishing ten blog posts, not counting the intro, I think it's time
for a status update and some numbers.

Technical stuff - sorting

First of all I had more technical difficulties than expected. I made some
stupid typos and other mistakes, and when I corrected those, the timestamps of
the source files got updated. Now blosxom, the blog engine that runs this
blog, sorts them at the very beginning. After a few days the posts seemd
randomly ordered, so I decided to order them chronologically, and I'll later
try to find a way to display the correct date, even after a small update.

Acknowledgements and Numbers

This was both necessary and possible because of the many people who
reported errors. Thanks to you all, and thanks to all my trustry readers. This
blog has about 500 visitors per day, nearly all of them following this
blog. After publishing on use.perl.org and
being recommended by perlbuzz.com I had a
day with about 1200 visitors. My record so far ;-).

Google says it knows about 59 subscribers to the RSS feed, and more than
55% of all visitors use Firefox, less than 12% use Internet Explorer.

I never imagined to reach such a broad audience with such a special
topic.

The Future

The next topic is not very exicting, but good to know anyway: how some
operators changed from perl 5 to 6.

After that it gets really interesting: I'll write about lazy lists, and then
custom operators, one of the coolest features of Perl 6 in my humble
opinion.

Further topics:

The MAIN sub - why you won't need Getopt::Long in most cases

Twigils (not much code, but a bit of background)

Enums and Mixins (why you can write $0 but True

Unicode - in preparation; partly the syntax isn't specced yet :/

Scoping - in preparation; how it avoids some pitfalls of perl 5

After that I'm really running out of ideas what to write; I could digress
from the current path of following the specs and give an overview of the
current compilers, their strengths, weaknesses and progress.

Another possible digression would be the introduction to November, a Perl 6
wiki, and so far the only real program that runs on Rakudo. I contributed the
grammar for a HTML::Template-like templating system, and I could write a bit
about its development.

If there's more interest I could also revisit some earlier topics, and
write more about them; for example there's a lot to say about rules or about
object orientation.

I want to leave that choice mostly to you, to the readers: what would you
like to read about? After working on Perl 6 for more than a year I have seem
to lost a sense for what's normal and what's exciting, which is why I need
your feedback.